Kate Bush, the queen of art-pop who defied her criticsThe singer's much-anticipated series of concerts are a sell-out, her return to the stage heralded by critics everywhere. Yet her particular brand of carefully crafted fantasy was not always so widely acclaimed.In 2014, the idea of Kate Bush as a pop star seems almost unbelievable. Did it actually happen, that run of singles so strange and yet so strong that they rose to the higher reaches of the hit parade, rubbing shoulders with Showaddywaddy and the Nolans on Top of the Pops? How did such an unearthly voice and unleashed imagination ever infiltrate the mundane mainstream, get playlisted on daytime Radio 1, profiled on Nationwide, parodied on Not the Nine O'Clock News?

The string of hits from Wuthering Heights to Cloudbusting is almost unrivalled for sustained brilliance and escalating oddness – only the Beatles, from start to finish, and Bowie, from Space Oddity to Fashion, surpass it.

Just take a look at the high points, year by year …

1978: Wuthering Heights. Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody, this was released as her first single at Bush's insistence in the face of opposition from seasoned and cautious EMI executives; wilfulness vindicated by the month it spent at the top of the charts.

1979: Them Heavy People (the radio cut from the On Stage EP), which namedropped the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and Sufi whirling dervishes, a celebration of being intellectually-emotionally expanded: "it's nearly killing me … what a lovely feeling".

1980: Breathing, a chillingly claustrophobic sound-picture of slow death through radiation sickness after the bomb drops: "Chips of plutonium/are twinkling in every lung." Swiftly followed by Army Dreamers: perhaps the best, certainly the most subtle of anti-war songs, inventing and rendering obsolete Let England Shake a couple of decades ahead of schedule.

1981: Sat in Your Lap. Avant-pop stampede of pounding percussion and deranged shrieks, a sister-song to Public Image Ltd's Flowers of Romance, but lyrically about the quest for knowledge: "I want to be a scholar!"

1982: The Dreaming, Bush's first real flop, but artistically a triumph: inspired by Australian indigenous culture and music, it's a Fairlight fairytale that used smashed-marble for percussion sounds and prophesised a completely alternate future for sampling-based pop than what would actually transpire.

1985: Running Up That Hill, an ecstastic protest against the limits of identity and empathy, pre-empting Prince's similarly inspired If I Was Your Girlfriend by a couple of years. Then Cloudbusting, a song/video about psychologist-turned-mystic Wilhelm Reich's attempts to build a rain-making machine, as seen through the faithful eyes of small son Peter.As words and as music, none of these scream "hit single". Yet all but one of them were. It's therefore hardly surprising that Bush's name gets reeled out, with varying degrees of appropriateness, as the ancestor for any new female artist trying to merge glamour, conceptualism, innovation and autonomy: recent examples include Grimes, Julia Holter and FKA Twigs. Yet, strange as it seems now, Bush was not always impregnably cool. In fact, despite her massive record sales and mainstream fame, she was not afforded much respect by critics or hip listeners in the late 1970s.

This was partly a matter of timing. After a year of being developed by EMI, (who funded her while she "grew up", expanding her horizons and honing her craft) Bush emerged into a British music scene transformed by punk. Both her sound and her look seemed conventionally feminine when juxtaposed with ferociously confrontational performers such as Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene, who shredded expectations of how the female voice should sound and who shattered taboos with their lyrical content and appearance. Bush's fantastical lyrics, influenced by children's literature, esoteric mystical knowledge, daydreams and the lore and legends of old Albion, seemed irrelevant, and deficient in street-cred at a time of tower-block social realism and agit-prop. Her odd combo of artiness and artlessness, and the way she came across in interviews – at once guileless and guarded – made her a target for music-press mockery. Her music was often dismissed as a middlebrow soft option, easy listening with literary affectations.

Despite being as young or younger than, say, the Slits, Bush seemed Old Wave: she belonged with the generation of musicians who had emerged during the 1960s ("boring old farts", as the punk press called them). Some of these BOFs were indeed her mentors, friends, and collaborators: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper. Growing up, her sensibility was shaped by her older brothers, in particular the musical tastes and spiritual interests of Jay, 13 years her senior and a true 60s cat.

Punk often sneered at "art" as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands such as Wire and Talking Heads. Yet Bush's music seemed the wrong kind of "arty": ornate rather than angular, overly decorative and decorous. It was the sort of musically accomplished, well-arranged, album-oriented art-pop that EMI had been comfortable with since the Beatles and had pursued with Pink Floyd, Cockney Rebel and Queen. They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.

And that's where Bush was situated on her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart: somewhere at the crossroads of singer-songwriter pop, the lighter side of prog, and the highbrow end of glam. Like Bowie, she studied mime with Lindsay Kemp, took classes in dance, and made a series of striking, inventive videos. EMI's Bob Mercer hailed Bush as "a completely audio-visual artist" and spoke of the company's intention to break her in America through television rather than radio (this, several years before MTV even existed). Her one and only tour was a theatrical mega-production in the rigidly choreographed tradition of Diamond Dogs, all dancers and costume changes and no-expense-spared staging. Reviewing one of the 1979 concerts for NME, Charles Shaar Murray typified the general rock press attitude towards Bush at that point, scornfully describing the show as a throw-back to "all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era.... [Bowie manager/Mainman boss] Tony DeFries would've loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago maybe I would've too. But these days I'm past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself." Spectacle, in the immediate years after punk, was considered a narcissistic star trip, fundamentally non-egalitarian.

Abandoning the live arena altogether, Bush plunged deeper into the studio, exploring its capacities for illusion-spinning: a theatricality of the mind's eye, conjured through sound. Her music got more challenging, harder to ignore or deny, as she gradually assumed total control. On 1980's Never For Ever, Bush co-produces but is clearly calling the shots: the result is like the missing link between Laura Ashley and Laurie Anderson. Two years later, the production and arrangement entirely in Bush's hands, came her wholly unfettered mistress-piece: The Dreaming.

Bush revelled in the empowerment, declaring that "the freedom you feel when you're actually in control of your own music is fantastic" but giving the emotion a distinctly female inflection: "as soon as you get your hands on the production, it becomes your baby. That's really exciting for me, because you do everything for your own child."Integral to her seizing of the means of musical production was Bush's ardent embrace of the Fairlight sampler, at that time an expensive plaything reserved for an elite of art-rock superstars such as herself and Peter Gabriel. Years ahead of The Art of Noise or Mantronix, she became a sampling pioneer, at a time when very few women outside the realm of academic electronic composers were involved with cutting-edge music-making technology.

Armed with the Fairlight and other state-of-the-art machines, Bush pushed her existing maximalist tendencies to the brink of overload, making The Dreaming a delirious, head-spinning experience. Paradoxically, such a sound was born not through spontaneity and randomness, but obsessive-compulsive meticulousness. It took a control freak to create such a freak-out.

Particularly arresting were the new uses Bush was making of her voice: tracks such as Pull Out the Pin and Suspended in Gaffa teemed with a panoply of exaggerated accents and jarring phrasings, as Bush applied thespian emphasis on particular words or syllables, and developed a whole new vocabulary of harsh shrieks and throat-scorched yelps. Emotions clashed or merged into hybrids impossible to parse. And all this was before she let rip with the studio effects and stereophonic trickery, as on Leave it Open, with its birds-on-helium twitters. Pretentious in the best sense of the word, Bush in the early 80s became one of those artists, such as the Associates or Japan, who caused Radio 1 daytime DJs to titter nervously, or be openly derisive.As the postpunk era gave way to the glossy, overproduced 80s, suddenly Bush's sumptuous soundscapes made more sense than they had during the era of 2 Tone and Joy Division. Hounds of Love was both a commercial and critical smash. For the first time, really, Bush was hip, raved about by music journalists without any hint of apologia or reservation. With bands such as the Banshees and the Bunnymen opting for lavish orchestrations, Bush now seemed less like a throwback to pre-punk times and more like a sort of posh auntie to the goths. Indeed, she came from the very same southern-edge-of-London suburbia as Siouxsie.

Of the ethereal-girl artists emerging in the mid-80s, Elizabeth Fraser was the most clearly indebted – indeed, the frou-frou side of Cocteau Twins could be traced to a single song on Never For Ever, Delius (Song of Summer). Björk's starburst of vocal euphoria likewise owed much to Bush. Enya, formerly of Clannad, followed in Bush's footsteps in her explorations of synths and sampling, as well as taking vocal multi-tracking to the dizzy limit.

The 90s saw the arrival of Tori Amos, whose piano-driven confessionals blatantly drew on Bush's ornate early sound. But there were less obvious inheritors, too. Touring their first album, Suede liked to air Wuthering Heights immediately before going onstage: Brett Anderson placed Bush in his personal trinity of utterly English ancestors, alongside Bowie and Morrissey. Esoteric-industrial duo Coil hailed Bush as "a very powerful witch", possibly knowing about – or simply sensing – the Bush family's shared enchantment with the ideas of Gurdjieff who, among other things, explored the magical effects of particular musical chords. Closeted fans started to emerge from the unlikeliest places: Johnny Rotten, for instance, gushed about the "beauty beyond belief" of Bush's music.But even as her deity status in the alternative-music pantheon gained lustre, Bush's creative ouput dimmed: album releases became sporadic, the gaps between grew longer and the impression made on public consciousness with each record fainter. Just about everybody knows Wuthering and Running Up That Hill, but how many common-or-garden pop punters could sing, or even name, a single off The Sensual World or The Red Shoes? In the 2000s, Aerial and 50 Words For Snow, quiet records both, received admiring notices, the kind of "glad you're back" reviews that Iconic Artists receive as a reward for a lifetime of achievement and the cumulative gratitude and affection inspired thereby.

Meanwhile, as a kind of public figure, Bush virtually disappeared.

It is striking how little we know about Kate Bush, how completely she's preserved her privacy.

During the critical phase of their rise to fame and often for a long time after it was strictly necessary, figures such as Bowie, Eno or Morrissey made an art form out of the music paper interview, using it as a forum to expound ideas, to hone or extend the public persona, to engage in mischief or mystique. But Bush never shone in that context. Interviews are a chore, a distraction from her real work, a waste of her time. Faced by a journalist's microphone, Bush is reserved, dry, ungenerous – the exact opposite of how she is faced by a microphone in a recording studio.I interviewed Bush around the time of The Red Shoes and found it a frustrating experience. It's not that she was terse or tetchy; she answered every question, mostly at decent-enough length, and got evasive only once or twice. But there was a glazed quality to the conversation, in the sense of trance-like and mechanical, but also "glazed" like a ceramic film forming an invisible barrier. There was a sense of non-encounter. I would attribute it to my own failings as an interviewer, except that my wife, far more adept at getting people to open up, had the same experience a month later. Fred Vermorel, the author of not one but two brilliantly unorthodox biographies of Bush, has written about the way "she will neutralise you by dissolving her presence in a polite fog". And if you look through the archive of her interviews, it's clear she's been doing that for years: it is striking how little of the vividness and exuberance of her music is allowed into the interviews.

In a 1993 TV doc, Bush spoke bluntly and almost disdainfully of her discomfort with interviews, her feeling that everything she has to say is in the work and that there it is said more eloquently than she could ever be in speech – a view that is echoed by her plea to fans to refrain from taking photographs and videos during her forthcoming concerts. But the real issue, I suspect, is that to consent to an interview is to allow oneself to be framed and interpreted, to have your utterances snipped up and shunted around the page. The obvious analogy would be a singer-songwriter who laid down the vocal melody but handed over the arrangement and production to someone else. There's a loss of control there.

Still, it's hard to think of an artist with such an amazing body of work who has produced such a small collection of quotable remarks. (Her only rival in this regard might be Prince.) Here, to close, is one she gave me that's not bad as a encapsulation of the spirit of Kate Bush and her Never Never Pop.

"That's what all art's about – a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't – in real-life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries. All art is like that: a form of exploration, of making up stories. Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really."

_________________This will be my monument, this will be your beacon when I'm gone...

Kate Bush returns to the stage - but where did she go?FOR the first time since 1979 the singer is about to perform live again to sell-out audiences. Why has she been away so long?

When rock star Kate Bush last performed live her stage show was something to behold. Dancers were dressed as violins, corpses toppled from walls and a magician wielded a "flying" cane. Special effects included elaborate back projections, complex lighting and billowing clouds of dry ice.

Meanwhile Bush, who was flinging herself around stage with such abandon that her technicians had to invent a version of the headset microphone using a wire coathanger, went through no fewer than 17 costume changes.

No wonder music magazine Melody Maker called it "the most magnificent spectacle ever encountered in the world of rock". But since that closing night of a six-week tour at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Eventin Apollo) 35 years ago Bush has never appeared in concert.

The singer who had become the first woman to have a No 1 hit with a self-written song Wuthering Heights retired from touring at 20.

So when it was announced this year that she was to play a 22-date residency at the venue where she performed her last gig interest was intense. The last time she had appeared in concert a pint of lager cost 24p, the average UK house price was just under £20,000 and the biggest box-office star was Burt Reynolds.

When about 100,000 tickets to the shows went on sale in March they sold out in 15 minutes. And when Bush takes to the stage for the first of her performances on Tuesday night she can be assured of a tumultuous reception but just why has she waited so long to make a return to performing live?

The concert performances in 1979 certainly took their toll on the singer who is just 5ft 3.5in. "It was enormously enjoyable," she has said. "But physically it was absolutely exhausting."

Perhaps her absence can be attributed to the commercial pressures of the music business. While Bush was determined to retain her artistic integrity she was put under pressure to bow to market realities. "People weren't even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano," she said in 1982. "The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist in a female body."

And a surreal artist at that. Her first album The Kick Inside went to No 3 in the UK charts. A follow-up rushed out at the insistence of her record company stalled at No 6 before she returned to form with Never For Ever, which entered the charts in the top spot.

It was her fourth release The Dreaming of which she once said, "That's my 'she's gone mad' album". And then there was the following album The Sensual World, which featured a track called Heads We're Dancing about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger only to discover in the morning that he is Hitler.

Since 1998 family has also been a factor in her disinclination to tour.

She met her husband guitarist Danny McIntosh in 1992 and six years later they had son Albert, who is known as Bertie.

Bush, now 56, guards her privacy so jealously that the fact she had a child was only revealed when friend Peter Gabriel blurted it out in an interview five years after he was born.

Despite a fortune estimated at £30million the singer refused to employ a nanny.

"My family life is incredibly important to me and it comes first," she once said. "My work fits in around it, which is quite easy to do with the recording process but something like doing shows would be incredibly disruptive."

Most artists and record com-panies would be appalled at the idea of releasing an album without an accompanying barrage of press junkets and a well-promoted tour but Bush is almost unique in maintaining a big following without either of these.

While she did continue to make sporadic appearances on shows such as Top Of The Pops in the early days her media appearances became more and more infrequent. These days the woman whom Sir Elton John once called a "beautiful mystery" lives in a house that is more fortress than conventional family home.

Her mansion on a remote Devon clifftop is surrounded by high-security fencing bearing warnings against trespass, spotlights illuminate the surrounding land and CCTV cameras pan the perimeter. Even people with a good reason for being there have to negotiate iron gates and a sophisticated electronic entry system to get inside.

Such measures are not entirely paranoid. She has long been plagued by over-enthusiastic fans. On Boxing Day in 2011 a mentally disturbed American fan called Frank Tufaro flew to London, boarded a connecting flight to Exeter and than paid a taxi driver £240 to take him to Bush's home, directing him using satellite co-ordinates he had downloaded from the internet and crossreferenced with maps.

Once there Tufaro, 32, broke a window to get in only to discover Bush and her family were not at home and was arrested shortly afterwards. He was subsequently deported by the UK Border Agency.

Her obsessive desire to avoid the limelight has led to a predictable rash of rumours about her mental and physical health. Had so much fame at such a young age pushed her over the edge? Was she locking herself away and bingeing on junk food?

She once addressed such speculation in an interview: "I go out of my way to be normal and I find it frustrating that people think I'm some kind of weirdo recluse who never comes out into the world. It is really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown,' or 'She's not mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature'."

Bush has released 10 albums in all, three of which topped the album chart and has had 25 Top 40 singles. And when her last album 50 Words For Snow made the charts in 2011 Bush became the first female artist to have a Top Five album in the UK charts in five successive decades.

Two years later she was awarded a CBE for services to music and broke cover in April last year in order to receive her medal from the Queen but - true to type - she left via a back entrance and refused to pose for photographers.

Even as she prepares to step back into the spotlight and perform in front of 5,000 fans on Tuesday night her camera shyness is in evidence. She has issued a plea to fans not to film the show on their smartphones or tablets. Clearly old habits die hard.

_________________This will be my monument, this will be your beacon when I'm gone...

As Kate Bush returns to the stage for the first time in 35 years, Helen Brown searches for clues on what the top-secret gigs will be like

The poster for Kate Bush's first series of concerts in 35 years finds her adrift in a dark and choppy sea. Her long, wavy hair swirls over a bright orange life jacket and her arms are stretched wide as she stares, hard, up at the camera. Here she is: part vulnerable human survivor, part mermaid. A 56-year-old artist who has both fought against, and floated with, the currents of popular music for almost forty years, making wonderfully strange music on her own terms and refusing to play the celebrity game.

The tiny torch beam shining from her jacket signals to fans that she'll probably be singing at least one song from The Ninth Wave: the second side of her 1985 masterpiece "The Hounds of Love". The song cycle, about a person lost at sea at night, begins with the lines: "Little light, shining/ Little light will guide them to me/ My face is all lit up." Piercing whale song and the soothing litany of sea areas from the Shipping Forecast wash through Bush's dreamlike piano and vocals.

Recent leaks from Pinewood Studios support the hope that Bush might be aiming to transform the interior of London's Hammersmith Apollo into a woozy waterworld for the 22 shows. We're told she has spent three days submerged in a flotation tank there, drafting in six diving instructors to help film a "daring stunt" during which she's hoisted from the waves by helicopter. Because Bush incorporated the whumping rhythm of a helicopter's rotating blades into her 1986 single "Experiment IV", she may well be playing that too. And because Nigel Kennedy added a traumatised violin to the track, it's possible he'll be making an appearance.

The top-secret nature of the project means the fan forums are buzzing with speculation. What we do know is that, although her voice has grown deeper and huskier, those who heard her on the set say her singing is still incredibly beautiful, even when she was in the water. We shouldn't be surprised to learn her voice can still melt hearts while she's in unusual positions. The headset now routinely attached to the faces of all pop singers was invented specifically for Bush's first and only tour back in 1979, because she wanted to keep dancing as she sang.

Bucking the punk fashion for raw, unadorned performance, the twenty-year-old singer-songwriter went all-out to create a pioneering theatrical extravaganza with The Tour of Life. Dancers dressed as violins, corpses tumbled from the walls and a magician performed with a 'flying' cane, while Bush rolled onto the stage in a red-upholstered egg, wafted through ethereal dry ice and then gunned down her fellow performers in a slick of fake blood.

As a writer who prefers fantasy narratives to directly autobiographical outpourings, Bush had already created many different characters for the 24 songs she played on The Tour of Life and tore through 17 costume changes to bring them all to life.

"If I can be the character in the song, then there's suddenly there's all this strength and energy in me that perhaps normally I wouldn't have," she once said. "Whereas if it was just me, I don't think I could walk on stage with confidence." She shrugged into a trench coat and Trilby for the kooky, spiritual investigations of Them Heavy People; ghostly chiffon for her debut hit Wuthering Heights; and flew offstage in a winged leotard for Kite. She remained barefoot throughout and was later rumoured to be naked beneath the WWII bomber jacket she wore, seated at the piano for the sweet ballad: Oh England My Lionheart.

Like David Bowie, the young Kate Bush was inspired by the dancer, choreographer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp – thrilling to the pimps, murderers and drag queens in his work and attending his 50p drop-in classes as a teenager. Although she also attended more conventional dance classes too – which coaxed an emotive and often erotic fluidity from her limbs – it's from Kemp she learned the compelling clowning which sets her apart from other performers. As biographer Graeme Thomson says: "For all the flash and grab of the theatrical spectacle, in the end the show really was all about her extraordinary face. One minute she was Douglas Fairbanks, the next Lillian Gish, the next Lolita."

READ: Why we should all love Kate Bush

If the exertions of dancing to her own high standards left her feeling like "a drained battery, very physically tired and also a bit depressed" (sometimes collapsing and being carried from the stage by a member of the crew) at twenty, it seems unlikely that she'll attempt too many demanding moves at 56.

But I think there will be a lot of film. Bush's imagination was always fired by cinema. Wuthering Heights was actually inspired by a 1970s film starring Timothy Dalton rather than Emily Bronte's novel. The Ukelele she strums in the video for her reggae cover of Rocket Man is a nod to Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot. Her entire 1993 album, The Red Shoes, was inspired by Powell and Pressburger's 1948 film of the same name.

Bush's own film work hasn't always lived up to her vision. The short musical film she directed to accompany The Red Shoes in 1993 was a hammy jumble, and the video she made to accompany her 2011 reworking of Deeper Understanding was a cringeworthily overliteral affair ending with actor Robbie Coltrane hanging comedian Noel Fielding from a coat hook.

But the short animations she created to accompany her last album – the jazzy and meditative 50 Words for Snow – are enchanting. In one, a woman lies beside a snowman in bed, her hands melting his skin as they attempt tenderness. In another, explorers trudge through blinding Tibetan white in search of the Yeti. The best is the graceful shadow puppet show for Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe, in which a dog journeys to the home of an elderly woman. The mystery and faux-naivety of the imagery is a perfect fit with Bush's sound. It would transfer very well to the stage. The animation includes feathers falling like snow behind a backlit cotton sheet, and you can imagine Bush would enjoy turning the Hammersmith Apollo into a snowglobe, fake snow tickling the noses of the crowd.

She has chosen a small venue perfect for that kind of intimacy, rather than an arena – although she could easily have filled one. And she has asked her audience not to break the spell by waving their phones in the air to record it. "I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras." she wrote on her website. "I know it’s a lot to ask but it would allow us to all share in the experience together.

50 Words For Snow also featured guest appearances from Stephen Fry and Sir Elton John (who recently credited Bush's part in Peter Gabriel's 1986 single Don't Give Up with helping him recover from addiction). So there's a chance one of them might appear. She's always enjoyed collaborating with comedians: Lenny Henry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson and Dawn French have all been involved in her work and a telephone conversation with Steve Coogan has been partially credited with tempting her back to the stage. As Bush's last live appearance was at a Dave Gilmour concert in 2002, the Pink Floyd guitarist would be the bookie's choice of special guests. But she's also enjoyed a mutual appreciation society with artists as diverse as John Lydon and Prince, whose summer of knockout, pop-up shows suggest he'd be a terrific curveball guest.

Although Bush was one of the first artists to use the studio as an instrument in its own right, bending, stretching and sampling sounds to amplify emotion, she has spoken out against the coldness of digital music and in recent years she's been getting back to audio basics. Her 2011 album, Director's Cut, stripped the studio varnish from a selection of songs from the 1980s and 1990s, and 50 Words for Snow spiralled out from a low-fi core of piano and vocal. It would be thrilling to hear some of her bigger, wilder songs performed this way. Just Kate at the keys, all alone on the stage at night. Hopefully not too afraid of us. Wow.